#ChurchToo

How Purity Culture Upholds Abuse and How to Find Healing

Emily Joy Allison

• Publisher: Broadleaf Books
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781506464817
• eBook ISBN: 9781506464824
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sexuality & Gender in Religion
• Index: Social Sciences

When Emily Joy Allison outed her abuser on Twitter, she launched #ChurchToo, a movement to expose the culture of sexual abuse and assault utterly rampant in Christian churches in America. Not a single denomination is unaffected. And the reasons are somewhat different than those you might find in the #MeToo stories coming out of Hollywood or Washington. While patriarchy and misogyny are problems everywhere, they take on a particularly pernicious form in Christian churches where those with power have been insisting, since many decades before #MeToo, that this sexually dysfunctional environment is, in fact, exactly how God wants it to be.

#ChurchToo turns over the rocks of the church's sexual dysfunction, revealing just what makes sexualized violence in religious contexts both ubiquitous and uniquely traumatizing. It also lays the groundwork for not one but many paths of healing from a religious culture of sexual shame, secrecy, and control, and for victims of assault to live full, free, healthy lives.

1

Keep Your Way Pure . . . or Else

How can young people keep their way pure?

By guarding it according to your word.

—Psalm 119:9

My father was an English teacher for part of my childhood. I inherited my love of writing from him, and he taught my siblings and me innumerable lessons about language and communication. One thing he used to say—that I still often repeat when I teach writing workshops—is this: “Specific is terrific.” If you’re going to have a good conversation, you can’t speak in vague abstractions. You have to define your terms.

Anyone who has ever been on the receiving end of a Christian friend or relative “speaking the truth in love” knows that Christians across the board have vastly different definitions for words like love, truth, Jesus, and more, even if they are technically using the same words when they speak. But in order to understand the dynamics of the abuse that takes place in Christian churches, families, and communities, it is necessary to have a handle on the words, concepts, and histories at play. I won’t be attempting to demonstrate that abuse occurs ubiquitously in these environments for the same reason I won’t be attempting to prove that the sky is blue. What I will be attempting to do, however, is demonstrate how the very specific theological and cultural aspects of many of our churches, schools, and other ministries both enable abusers and retraumatize survivors. Because as we know, abuse occurs everywhere. While it is a Christian problem, it is also a problem in other religions, and among the nonreligious, and in Washington and Hollywood, and across all political party lines. So why call out #ChurchToo specifically?

As much as many evangelical Christians may like to claim otherwise, the most popular modern Christian teaching on human sexuality in the West—that the only right expression of sexuality is between a man and a woman in a lifelong, monogamous, legal marriage—is not and has never been “the historic Christian position” on the topic. Leaving aside the fact that state-sanctioned marriage for the sake of romantic love is a historically recent invention and not a category any writer of the bible would have been familiar with, the biblical writers themselves have very little to say on the topic—outside of a few scattered verses throughout the biblical canon, the significance of which hinge on the translation of several Greek and Hebrew words whose true meanings are uncertain and hotly debated.

Now, before you check out on me, don’t worry. After this paragraph, I will dedicate exactly zero words of this book to pointing out why such-and-such verse doesn’t actually say the thing conservative Christians say it does. After many years of having these conversations, I’ve come to realize that we can bible-bomb each other back and forth all day long, but if someone is bound and determined to translate porneia as “fornication,” there is no hermeneutical appeal you can possibly make to stop them. Translating porneia as “fornication” is not a hermeneutical decision but rather an ideological one. Not only that, but regardless of “what the text actually says,” I am more interested in the question of how it is used. And while I’ll list several of my favorite resources for sex-positive Christian theology and engaging with many of the “clobber verses” (as they are so often called) concerning human sexuality in the appendix in the back of the book, doing sex-positive theology is not my project here, for three reasons.

First, other people have already done that work better than I could: liberation theologians and womanists and people with more advanced degrees from schools where you couldn’t also get academic credit for praying in front of the Planned Parenthood down the street. Second, a sex-positive Christian theology is not the most useful path forward for everyone (more on this at the end of the book). And third, as a friend of mine posted on Facebook the other day, “Not all problematic sacred passages are misinterpreted.”1 I think it’s up to each individual to decide what their relationship with the bible will be, but I do not advocate an approach that requires that everything in the bible be “without error” or shoehorned into a meaning that doesn’t offend people with twenty-first-century understandings of things like human sexuality, consent, or social justice.

But without attempting to reinterpret every bible verse that even remotely refers to human sexuality, I must point out that the necessity of abstinence until heterosexual marriage simply did not seem to be a huge concern at the time the bible was written. I’m not at all claiming that Christianity has always had a historically positive view of sex and the body—but I suspect even Paul would be a little flabbergasted by most True Love Waits talking points.

But here’s the thing: lying about something having always been a particular way is one of the ways that abusive power structures are maintained. Many people in Christian churches today are terrified to question the doctrines of sexuality they are being told are “orthodoxy” by their pastors and leaders because they feel like they would be questioning God themself and not an invention of the late twentieth century born out of white supremacy and anxiety about the sexual revolution.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. First we need to talk a little history.

A Short History of Everything . . . Purity

If we were all at my kitchen table right now, I’d pour you each a big glass of wine to get through this part because there are a lot of dates and resolutions and amendments, but I promise if you read to the end, you’ll have a much better understanding of why we’re in the situation we’re currently in when it comes to #ChurchToo.

The modern “purity” movement as we know it today only came about in the last few decades as a result of political forces much larger than itself. Much has been written about the galvanization of evangelicals around the issue of resisting desegregation years before being antiabortion became a litmus test of true Christianity, and if you ever have a spare afternoon, I highly recommend falling down that particular Google rabbit hole. But for our purposes here, I think it is important to point out that up until the mid-to-late 1970s, issues related to human sexuality were not a primary aspect of political activism and social organizing for evangelical Christians. Evangelical leaders and politicians were far more preoccupied with protecting “religious liberty” as the government began to rescind the tax-exempt status of private (read whites-only) schools that had formed in response to the desegregation mandate.2 In fact, when it came to the issue of abortion, in 1971 the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution supporting “legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother,” and they reaffirmed that position in 1974 and 1976 (Roe v. Wade was ruled on in 1973).3 Evangelicals by and large had little interest in getting into the weeds about abortion because at the time it was considered a Catholic issue.

But that all changed when it became clear that continuing to resist desegregation was futile and also made evangelicals look like The Bad Guys™. So over the course of a few short years between 1970 and 1980, the dialogue shifted from desegregation to abortion because, as Fred Clark on his blog Slacktivist notes, “redefine abortion as baby-killing and you redefine everyone who supports it as a baby-killer. And you’re always guaranteed to hold the moral high-ground.”4 In that same blog, Clark says of the belief that life begins at conception and that Christianity is essentially pro-life that “no white evangelical born before 1970 grew up believing this. No white evangelical born after 1980 grew up not believing this.”5

So why all the talk about abortion? Isn’t this supposed to be about purity?

Stick with me. I contend that the brand-new evangelical Christian obsession with abortion in the late 1970s and early 1980s as a result of losses in the battle against desegregation is intimately connected to the birth of the modern purity movement. At its heart, abortion is a question of sexual control. Who will reproduce? Does it matter if they want to or not? And along with abortion come other issues: contraception, sexual orientation, marriage, and more. The antiabortion movement among evangelical Christians in my lifetime has consistently been skeptical of contraception (at best), exclusive of nonheterosexual sexual identities, and focused on the preservation of the institution of marriage to the detriment of the health and well-being of the actual human beings inside the institution.

This theory starts to make a little more sense when you note that True Love Waits, the prototypical evangelical abstinence-only “sex ed” program, has its roots in a “Christian Sex Education project” begun by cofounder Jimmy Hester in 1987.6 By 1992, True Love Waits was a part of LifeWay, and by 1994, they had stuck 102,000 abstinence pledge cards from young people on the lawn of the Orlando Convention Center during the Southern Baptist Convention. The book Why Wait? by Joshua McDowell came out that same year, and I Kissed Dating Goodbye by Joshua Harris, who has since renounced some of the views he espoused in that book and deconverted from Christianity entirely, followed in 1997.

Also happening during this time? The AIDS crisis.

The mid-to-late 1970s was a time of increasing evangelical organization around not just abortion but homosexuality. Tim LaHaye’s book The Unhappy Gays (the same Tim LaHaye who would later coauthor the hit apocalyptic Left Behind series with Jerry B. Jenkins, who had a parking spot outside my dorm building at Moody), which portrayed LGBTQ persons as mentally ill deviants who would rather be sick and alienated from their families and society than submit to the will of God, was released in 1978—the same year that Christians were attempting to pass Proposition 6 in the state of California, which would have allowed public schools to fire gay and lesbian teachers on the basis of their sexuality. The AIDS crisis is considered to have started in 1981, and by 1987, when the crisis was well underway, Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina attached an amendment to a spending bill “designed to prevent the federal government from paying for any AIDS education or prevention materials that would ‘promote or encourage, directly or indirectly, homosexual sexual activities.’”7

In spite of the suffering the gay community was experiencing, many Christians were calloused toward the AIDS crisis and even viewed it as a just punishment for those aforementioned “homosexual sexual activities.” Jerry Falwell Sr. of Liberty University, one of the largest Christian universities in the world, famously stated during the crisis that “AIDS is not just God’s punishment for homosexuals, it is God’s punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals.”8 Helms’s amendment certainly seemed to view it that way: “The CDC immediately adopted strict guidelines that applied to every pamphlet, flier, and poster it printed or paid for. The agency said ‘no,’ for example, to any picture of the genital organs, the anus, and either safe or unsafe sex. In addition, all prevention materials had to warn about the dangers of promiscuity and IV drug use and propound the benefits of abstinence.”9

Oh yeah, and speaking of abstinence, the Adolescent Family Life Act (AFLA), emphasizing abstinence until marriage, was first passed in 1981, the same year the AIDS crisis started. They called it “the chastity act” at the time.10 By 1996, there was a whole eight-point system of what constituted “abstinence-only education” according to the government, including topics like the expectation of monogamy in marriage, the potential of drug and alcohol use to put young people at risk of sexual advances, and the dangers of out-of-wedlock pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections (STIs).11 The fight over abstinence-only versus medically accurate and consent-based sex education in schools continues to this day, and we will look at it more in chapter 5.

And one more thing. From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, violence against abortion clinics and abortion providers increased exponentially. Kidnappings, assaults, shootings, and bombings were regular features in the news, and many of the perpetrators of this violence identified as devout Christians who were doing what they felt God called them to do.

OK. Whew. Take a breath. History lesson over.

So what’s the moral of the story?

Far from being an essential feature of historic Christianity, the popular purity teachings of today are a result of white anxiety around being able to produce enough well-behaved Christian babies to remain in charge of Western society. This relatively recent soup we’re all swimming in is the basis of the modern purity movement—or what many people refer to as purity culture. You may have heard that term before, and you may have noticed that I haven’t used it in this book yet, for a very specific reason.

Back in my day, many years ago, when Twitter was just a vast wasteland flowing with primordial ooze and there was no Donald Trump and you could tweet at restaurants and get free coupons any time you wanted and the spirit of God was hovering over the waters, purity culture arose as a term to describe what many people were beginning to write about then—this system of sexual dos and don’ts that had been passed down to Christians of an entire generation as gospel truth. Authors Donna Freitas and Jessica Valenti both used the term in books during that time, and it became popular on the internet as a phrase that signified both the religious corollary of rape culture (the societal injustices that enable and excuse assault and abuse) and the theological teachings that uphold that culture.12 For many years, those of us who were doing work at the intersection of faith and sexuality used the phrase purity culture easily and seamlessly, and whenever we used it, people knew that we were talking about the culture created by theologies like male leadership, modesty, abstinence-only sex education, and other doctrines that allowed abuse and dysfunction to thrive.

But as with all popular and useful phrases, purity culture has recently fallen prey to the phenomenon of concept creep. Just as emotional labor has come to be used to mean “helping my friends with their problems” or “remembering my relatives’ birthdays,”13 purity culture is now often used by evangelical Christians still deeply committed to teaching its doctrines to refer to the more obvious, extreme examples of abstinence-only teachings—such as metaphors wherein nonvirgins are compared to chewed-up gum or Harris’s flat prohibition of all dating relationships in I Kissed Dating Goodbye. These teachings, we are assured by these evangelical Christians, got the grace of God wrong. They focused too much on a list of things not to do and not enough on Jesus. Sexual sin like having sex before marriage or giving in to your same-sex desires isn’t any worse than any other sin, you see! And, according to them, the answer isn’t to throw the purity baby out with purity culture bathwater—the answer is, as Joe Carter recently stated in a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1. Keep Your Way Pure . . . or Else
• 2. For Women Who Profess Reverence for God
• 3. The Works of the Flesh
• 4. At All Times
• 5. Not Even a Hint
• 6. Male and Female He Created Them
• 7. As Long as He Lives
• 8. I Suffer Not a Woman
• 9. Greater Love
• 10. Healing Paths Diverge
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix: Frequently Asked Questions and Resources
• Notes